"Yukos will try to survive shrunken, though it will surely get far into the background, and badly lose balance. It will try to keep afloat even if Yuganskneftegaz is auctioned off, December 19."
An extraordinary holders' meeting has been scheduled for December 20 to decide whether the company is to accept bankruptcy or liquidation.
An anti-crisis program to accept was initially on the prospective agenda, but the company board advised to strike it off. The board does not think the blueprinted program will be practicable at all now that an auction has been appointed to sell at an understated price a huge block of Yugansk, biggest Yukos production branch. The matter became all the worse as the drowning mammoth was faced with more fiscal claims, that for last year. The claims roughly amount to 170 billion rubles (today's Central Bank rate is R28.00/US$1). More than that, federal bodies have not made any official reply yet to repeated Yukos offers to settle the crisis.
Steven Theede, Yukos CEO, thinks it is illegal to auction off Yugansk. Viktor Geraskchenko says he is right-it is illegal to sell production assets with other assets close at hand, he stressed.
Lump fiscal claims on Yukos for 2000-2003 and Yugansk for 2001-2002 make $23.7 billion, of which a mere four billion has been paid for today.
Company capitalization has shrunken 16-fold since Mikhail Khodorkovsky, its former proprietor, was arrested more than a year ago, and now barely exceeds two billion dollars.
"Has the Directors' Board done everything it could to settle the crisis?" a reporter asked Mr. Gerashchenko.
"The board has debated all matters concerning fiscal claims of various kinds. We wrote letters to the country's leadership-but they were left unanswered," was the reply.
